NPS Form 10-900 USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form (Rev. 8-86) OMB No. 1024-0018 UNDERGROUND RAILOAD RESOURCES IN THE U.S. THEME STUDY Page 1 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form E. STATEMENT OF HISTORIC CONTEXT: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN AMERICAN HISTORY The primary purpose of this context is to assist in the identification of places associated with the Underground Railroad that are eligible for National Historic Landmark designation and for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. In 1990, the United States Congress authorized the National Park Service to conduct a study of the resources available nationally for the interpretation of the Underground Railroad. A special resource study published in 1995 determined that there were sufficient resources available and suggested a variety of approaches for commemoration of the Underground Railroad. Operating under the 1990 legislation, the National Park Service has produced educational materials and technical support for researchers. An Underground Railroad Handbook was published in February 1997, followed by “Exploring a Common Past: Researching the Underground Railroad.” This study provides historic context for the development of nominations for the Underground Railroad theme. Identifying historic properties associated with the Underground Railroad is an extremely varied task. To help the researcher understand the various aspects of the Underground Railroad, this context is divided into sections that focus on a complex but related series of historical activities and geographic regions, referred to generally as the Underground Railroad. The term is capitalized to signal inclusiveness in that larger organizing concept. When used as a descriptive adjective or as a reference to some part of the concept, it is not capitalized. This context is not exhaustive and it briefly reviews the history of slavery and of North American resistance to slavery, excluding Canada. It evaluates examples of structures, buildings, communities, regions and transportation routes related to fugitives from slavery. These examples do not encompass all the varieties of Underground Railroad activity that were ever enacted; no study could make that claim. However, this study provides a structure into which researchers may fit more information and evidence as it is developed. The report also describes aspects of antislavery activity and slave resistance which are precursors or marginal to the Underground Railroad story but which contribute to its emergence. This context study treats such events, often historically important in their own right, as connected but not central to the Underground Railroad story. INTRODUCTION The Underground Railroad refers to the effort -- sometimes spontaneous, sometimes highly organized -- to assist persons held in bondage in North America to escape from slavery. While most runaways began their journey unaided and many completed their self-emancipation without assistance, each decade in which slavery was legal in the United States saw an increase in the public perception of a secretive network and in the number of persons willing to give aid to the runaway. The period under consideration for this study is primarily the 1780s to 1865, with emphasis on the years from 1830 to 1865 when most antislavery advocates abandoned their hope for gradual emancipation and adopted immediate abolition of slavery as their goal. Although divided, the abolitionist movement was successful in expanding the informal network known as the Underground Railroad and in publicizing it. The term “Underground Railroad” had no meaning to the generations before the first rails and engines of the 1820s, but the retrospective use of the term in this study is made so as to include incidents which have all the characteristics of Underground Railroad activity, but which occurred earlier. These activities foreshadowed and helped to shape the Underground Railroad. While the primary focus will be on the most active period of Underground Railroad activity, it is important to document related events which NPS Form 10-900 USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form (Rev. 8-86) OMB No. 1024-0018 UNDERGROUND RAILOAD RESOURCES IN THE U.S. THEME STUDY Page 2 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form contribute to an understanding of this nationally significant, geographically-widespread enterprise. Several aspects of the history of American slavery, as well as categories of sites, not directly related to the Underground Railroad are still central to an understanding of it. Earlier resistance and antislavery actions are the base on which the Underground Railroad was built. Resistance to lifetime servitude began with the first Africans forcibly brought to the Western hemisphere in the 1500s, and resistance continued until the last emancipations in North America. Without this continued resistance, there would have been no need for the extensive legal codes which upheld property rights in human beings or for the brutal intimidation which always existed just beneath the surface of this coercive social system. Yet, for purposes of identifying historic properties related to the Underground Railroad, an important distinction must be made between the era of the Underground Railroad and those activities which are precursors or simply contemporary to it. Distinctions must be made in levels of significance and not every act of slave resistance or sign of antislavery activity can be included. Nor can every example of the experience of enslavement be connected to the Underground Railroad. But the most distinct and verifiable sites for each of these related events may be joined to a particular Underground Railroad story. Examples may include the town of Ripley, Ohio, in which several buildings and the Ohio River contribute to the story. In another example, the story of Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbarn, who went into Kentucky and brought out Lewis Hayden and his family, crosses state lines and involves farm sites, courthouses, jails, and trails. This story connects Kentucky with Ohio and with Massachusetts, where the Haydens settled. Here the concept of multiple property listings may be particularly useful because a variety of properties within a given area may better reproduce the texture of life, the social tensions, and the economic realities which gave rise to and supported the Underground Railroad.1 The origin of the term “Underground Railroad” cannot be precisely determined. What is known is that both those who aided escapees from slavery, and those who were outraged by loss of slave property, began to refer to runaways as part of an “Underground Railroad” network by the 1830s. The “Underground Railroad” described an activity that was locally organized with no real center and it sometimes existed rather openly in the North, while often just beneath the surface of daily life in the Upper South and certain Southern cities. The Underground Railroad, where it existed, offered local aid to runaway slaves assisting them from one point to another. Farther along, others would take the passenger into their transportation system until the final destination had been reached.2 The rapidity with which the term became commonly used did not mean that incidents of resistance to slavery increased significantly around 1830 or that more attempts were made to escape from bondage. It did mean that more white northerners were prepared to aid runaways and to give some assistance to the northern blacks who had always made it their business to help escapees from slavery. It was on January 1, 1831, that the first issue of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, was published. That event marks the traditional beginning of the era of abolitionist attack on the institution of slavery and of angry and defensive responses from the slaveholding South. The high visibility of the abolitionist attack has perhaps encouraged historians to overemphasize that part of the antislavery movement because the abolitionists left so many printed records. Other aspects of the Underground Railroad, other than the abolitionist movement, also deserve attention. First, there were probably at least as many attempts at escape from slavery in the North America of the late 1600s and the 1700s, both individual and in groups, as in the 1800s when various forces, from the national Constitution to the local slave patrols, were all aligned to prevent escapes. Second, while primary attention is given to the drama of slave escapes to the free states of the North and to Canada, 1 Randolph Paul Runyon, Delia Webster and the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Stuart Seely Sprague, ed., His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 2 Many sources have described this activity. See the Bibliographic Essay for suggestions on the assessment and use of such sources. NPS Form 10-900 USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form (Rev. 8-86) OMB No. 1024-0018 UNDERGROUND RAILOAD RESOURCES IN THE U.S. THEME STUDY Page 3 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form there was also a flow of runaways into Spanish Florida and into Spanish Mexico and the subsequent Mexican Republic. Although the numbers escaping southward and northward across the borders